As discussed, it’s important to protect your site by setting proper file permissions on the server. This can be tricky for certain directories such as /uploads/, /upgrade/, and /backups/, which need to be writable by the server in order for things like uploads, upgrades, and backups to work.

Recently, I found myself on the front lines of WordPress’ somewhat complicated Media-Library system. The site that I was developing required a rather elaborate system of retrieving and displaying image attachments. So, using the latest version of WordPress (2.8.3 at the time), I found myself experimenting with as many template tags and custom functions as I could find. After much experimentation, I discovered the perfect solution, and along the way I collected a healthy collection of recipes for displaying image attachments and their various types of associated information.